Battling Cancer with Nanotechnology Overview

About this story

“I think we are on the verge of conquering cancer. … I think the generation that is growing up now - my daughters, my son, children of their age - will be able to live in a world where cancer is no longer a death sentence for anybody.”

To meet Mauro Ferrari is to meet a visionary, an optimist, a man determined to get over or around every obstacle on the way to conquering cancer’s cruel reign.  A father of five who lost his first wife to cancer, he joined his prodigious mathematical physics and engineering skills to medicine, becoming a leading pioneer in cancer nanomedicine.

A conversation with Mauro yields a veritable cornucopia of visions for what one might term the War on Cancer 2.0:

Picture a multi-stage delivery system able to negotiate its way past all the body’s defenses to deliver a tiny lethal dose of anti-cancer medicine to a deeply buried tumor… Imagine being able to diagnose cancer from a simple blood draw…

The brief set of stories included here resulted from a 2007 visit to Mauro’s former lab at the University of Texas Brown Institute for Molecular Medicine.  Since then, Mauro and some of his research associates, (including Ennio Tasciotti, also featured in these stories)  have transitioned to Houston’s Methodist Hospital Research Institute; Mauro as President and CEO.

Additional information

• National Cancer Institute Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer
• Department of Nanomedicine at Methodist Hospital Research Institute